The Tension Between East and West

Cosmic Memory

Schmidt Number: S-4856

On-line since: 15th August, 2012

5

Cosmic Memory

NOWADAYS,
if you start to discuss, with someone who is interested in these
matters, the possibility of achieving a knowledge of spiritual life
in conjunction with the sensuous and physical world, you will
generally meet with a sympathetic reception. At any rate, the
question will be raised: Are there paths by which man can reach
some kind of spiritual knowledge? even though it may often turn
out that the only knowledge of a spiritual world allowed is one
that takes the form of general concepts and ideas, a vague
pantheism perhaps or a conception of life reminiscent of
mysticism. If however you should then attempt, as it became
necessary for me to do in my book
Occult Science,
to describe a real cosmology, a science of the origin and
development of the world in specific terms, discussion
with a rationalist is usually at an end. He reacts strongly to
the suggestion that anyone today might be in a position, on
some epistemological basis or other, to make a statement about
a spiritual origin of the world, about forces operating
spiritually in the world's development, and about the
possibility that this development, after having passed through
a sensuous and physical phase, might lead back once more into a
spiritual form of existence. The reaction of the rationalist to
such a suggestion, implicit in the specific descriptions in
Occult Science,
for example, is to avoid having anything
to do with someone who makes claims of this kind. He will think
that, if a man sets out to make specific statements about such
matters, he is probably on the verge of losing his reason; at
least, we cannot compromise ourselves by becoming involved in
discussing these details.

It
is naturally impossible, in a single lecture, to present any
details of cosmology as they follow from the philosophy of life
I am advocating. Instead, I should like today to try and show
you how spiritual science can arrive at a cosmology and a
knowledge of the spiritual impulses underlying the
world's development. The reproach that is usually
levelled at anyone who now attempts such a task is that of
anthropomorphism, that is of taking features of human mental
life and projecting them — in accordance with one's
wishes or some other predilections or prejudices — onto
the cosmos. A closer examination of the way in which the
philosophy of life presented here attains its cosmological
results, however, should be enough to demonstrate that there
cannot be the slightest question of anthropomorphism. On the
contrary, this philosophy seeks its data about the world and
its development through a spiritual cognition that is just as
objective as the scientific study of nature.

You
will have gathered, from the lectures I have given so far, what
the view of the world I am advocating aims at in its
research methods. On the one hand, it desires to preserve
everything that humanity has acquired over the last three
or four centuries in scientific conscientiousness and a sure
and careful method of seeking truth. In particular, this view
of life certanly does not wish to exceed the limits of natural
knowledge, in so far as this is appropriate, but to observe
carefully where the limits of purely natural knowledge are
located. The existence of such limits is much discussed today,
and has been for a long time. We can say that the opinions of
trained natural scientists on this subject today are founded on
notions that more philosophically inclined minds derive
from Kant, and other minds, to whom a more popular treatment
appeals, from Schopenhauer and others. A great deal of material
bearing on this point could be given.

Now
it is probably true to say that Kant and Schopenhauer, and all
those who follow in their wake, are dangerous guides to the
discernment of the limits of natural knowledge, because these
thinkers, very enticingly as I would say, stopped short at a
certain point in their consideration of the human cognitive
faculty and the capacities of the human psyche. They drew the
line at a certain point; and their approach to this point is
extraordinarily shrewd. Yet the fact remains that, as
soon as we become aware of the need to consider man as a
whole and to take into account all that can follow from man's
physical and spiritual organism in the shape of cognitive
activity and inner experience, we shall also realize that a
one-sided critique of the cognitive faculty can only lead to
one-sided conclusions. If we wish to examine the relation of
man to the world, in order to establish whether there is a path
that leads from man to knowledge of the world, we must
take him as a whole and consider him in his entire being.

It
is from this point of view that I should now like to raise the
question: Assuming that the limits of our knowledge of nature,
which scientists too have been discussing since Du Bois-Reymond
(though they are viewed very differently today from the way he
saw them half a century ago), did not exist, what would be
man's position in the world? Assuming that man's theoretical
cognitive faculty, by which he connects his concepts with
observations and the results of experiments in order to arrive
at the laws of the universe, could also penetrate without
difficulty into the organic realm; if it could advance as far
as life, there would be little reason why it should stop short
of the higher modes of existence — the realms of soul and
spirit. Assuming therefore that the ordinary consciousness we
employ in the sciences and work with in ordinary life were able
at all times not only to approach the outside of life, but also
to penetrate below the surface of things to their inner
being: if there were thus no limit of knowledge, what sort of
constitution would a man need? Well, his relation to the world
would be such that his entire being, his inmost experience,
would be constantly entering into everything with its
spiritual antennae. Though this may appear paradoxical to some
people, a dispassionate observer of life and of the
relationship of man to the world will realize: a being whose
ordinary everyday consciousness was unlimited would
inevitably lack the capacity to love.

And
if we reflect on the significance of this capacity for our
whole life, and on what we are in life because we can love, we
shall conclude: on this mortal earth we should not be men, in
the sense in which we must in fact be men, if we did not
have love. But love demands that we should meet another
individual, whatever realm of nature it may belong to, as
self-contained individuals. We must not invade this other
individual with our clear and lucid thinking; on the contrary,
at the very moment when we develop love, our essence must
become active — that part of us which is beyond clear and
pellucid concepts! The moment we were able to invade the other
individual with clear and lucid concepts, love would die. Since
man must be a creature of love by virtue of his task on earth,
and since when man has a certain capacity it conditions his
whole being, we can conclude: man definitely needs limits
to his knowledge of the outside world, and must not
penetrate beyond them if, within his ordinary consciousness, he
is to fulfil his task here on earth. The property that enables
him to be a creature of love has its obverse side in his
ordinary knowledge, which has to stop at the limit that is set
for us in order that we may be creatures capable of love.

This is just an outline that each individual can fill out for
himself; even so, it reveals something that has certain
consequences. It shows, for example, that we must go
forward from the premises of Kantian philosophy, and look at
man as a whole, inhabiting life as a living creature. This is
the first thing that the view of the world I am advocating has
to say about the limits of scientific knowledge — and we
shall be hearing more about them.

Here is one of the two guiding principles for any view of life
and the world that is to be taken seriously today. The other,
to which I have already drawn attention in the last few days,
can be described by saying: any view of life and the world that
is to be taken seriously today must not lose itself in nebulous
mysticism. It is a fact that even noble minds at the
present time, observing that natural science is limited and
cannot provide us with a springboard into the spiritual world,
throw themselves into the arms of mysticism, especially the
older forms of humanity's mystical endeavour. Yet in face of
the other kinds of knowledge man requires* today, this
certainly cannot be the right way. Mysticism seeks, by looking
within man, to reach the actual foundations of existence. But
once again, human knowledge is limited when it comes to looking
within man. Assuming that man were capable of looking into
himself without limit, to the point where the deepest
essence of human nature is manifest, where man is in touch with
the eternal springs of existence and links his personal
existence with that of the cosmos: what would he then have to
do without? — Those who gain great inner satisfaction
from mysticism often summon up the most varied things from
within themselves. I have already indicated that what is
brought up in this way ultimately turns out, on closer
examination by a true student of the soul, to rest on some
external observation. This observation sinks into
subconscious depths, is permeated by feeling and will and
organic process, and then appears again in an altered form.
Anything observed can undergo a transformation or metamorphosis
so great that the mystic will believe he is drawing from the
depths of his soul something that must demonstrate the eternal
foundations of the soul itself. Even such outstanding mystics
as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler are not completely free
from the error that creeps in when we mistake altered concepts
of ordinary consciousness for independent revelations of the
human soul.

Objective reflection on this state of affairs, however, enables
us to answer the question: What would man have to do without
if, in ordinary consciousness, he could see right into himself
at any moment? He would have to do without something that is
essential for the well-ordered existence of our soul: a
reliable memory.

For
what is the relation of memory to the claims of
mysticism? What I am now going to outline in a rather
popular way I could also present quite scientifically. But we
only need an explanation, and this can be conveyed in popular
terms. When we observe the outside world and inwardly transform
what we experience there as whole men, so that it can later
reappear as memory, the spiritual result of our external
observation actually falls on something like a mirror within
us. This is a simile, but at the same time it is more than a
simile. Impressions from outside cannot be allowed to
stimulate us so much that we carry them down into our deepest
self. It must be possible for outside stimuli to be
reflected. Our organism, our human essence must behave
like a reflecting device. Ought we, then, to break through this
reflecting device in order to reach what lies behind the
mirror?

That is what the mystic is trying to do, without knowing it.
But we need our reliable, well-ordered memory. If there
are any gaps in it, as far back into our childhood as we can
remember, we shall fall victim to pathological mental states.
Man must be so constituted that he retains the experiences that
come from outside. He cannot therefore be so constituted that
he can penetrate directly into his deepest self. If we
make the mystic's attempt to penetrate into our innermost self
with ordinary consciousness, we shall only reach the
reflecting device. And it is right, from the point of view of
our humanity, that we should there come up against the concepts
we have absorbed from outside. Here again, we must look
at the whole man, as he needs to be if he is to possess a
memory, in order to see that mysticism is impossible for
ordinary consciousness.

There are thus two limits to ordinary consciousness: a limit of
natural knowledge, in relation to the outside, physical and
sensuous world; and a limit in relation to mystical endeavours.
And it is just from a clear insight into these two limits that
there can in turn arise that other endeavour I have described
here as befitting a modern search for the spiritual world. I
mean the endeavour to draw from the soul dormant powers of
cognition, so that by attaining a different form of
consciousness we can see into the spiritual world.

With the kinds of knowledge I have been speaking of in the last
few days, we can look at man as a creature capable of love and
as a creature capable of memory. When we do so, we shall
recognize that ordinary consciousness (operating through the
senses, the intellect and the logical faculty) must call a halt
in face of the outside world: for it is only by treating itself
as a mere instrument for systematizing the outside world that
it can become capable of developing further and creating that
vitalized thinking of which I have spoken in previous
lectures.

When we examine our own reaction to nature by means of this
vitalized thinking, we find that, at the very moment when we
have developed our logical faculty to the point where it
provides a means of systematizing external phenomena, our
ordinary consciousness is extinguished in the act of cognition.
However clear our consciousness is up to a certain point in a
given process of knowing nature, at this point it really goes
over in part into a state of sleep, into the subconscious. Why
is this? It is because at this point there must come into
operation the faculty that diffuses something more than
abstract thinking into the world around us: one that carries
our being out into it.

For
inasmuch as we love, our relationship to the world around us is
not one of cognition but one of reality, a real
relationship of being. Only by developing vital thinking
are we able to carry over our experience into the reality of
things. We pour out our vitalized thoughts; follow up the
beginnings of spiritual life that exist outside (in the shape
of spiritual world-rhythm and appearance); and, by cultivating
empty consciousness as I have described, advance further and
further into the spiritual world, which is linked with the
physical and sensuous one. Compared with ordinary
consciousness, we feel, in a super-sensible act of cognition of
this kind, as if we have been awakened from sleep. We eavesdrop
on our being as it becomes a living thing.

Here is something that can make a more shattering impression on
the seeker after spiritual experience than anything he can
obtain by repeating the experience of the profoundest
mystic.

More moving than the latter's absorption in his inner self is
the moment of realizing that, at a certain instant of higher
cognition, man must pour out his own self as being into
the outside world, and that the act of cognition transforms
mere knowledge into real life, into a real symbiosis with the
outside world.

At
first, however, this is linked with an appreciable
intensification of the sense of self. What happens is
something like this: in ordinary cognition of the outside
world, our ego goes as far as the frontiers of nature. Here,
the ego is repulsed. We feel surrounded on all sides by
psychic walls, so to speak. This in turn has repercussions on
the sense of self. The sense of self has its own strength, and
it gets the right temper precisely through the fact that, along
with this feeling of something like confinement, there is
intermingled that self-surrender to the world and its creatures
that comes of love. In super-sensible cognition, the self is
made even stronger, and there is, we may say, a danger that it
will transform the love that rightfully exists on earth into a
selfish submersion in things, that it will effusively thrust
and insinuate itself into things. By so doing, the self will
expand.

That is why, in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
I attach so much weight to the
preparatory exercises. These exercises are aimed at
self-discipline in relation to the sense of self, and at
helping us to develop the necessary capacity for love in
ordinary life and ordinary consciousness, before attempting to
move into the super-sensible world by means of higher knowledge.
We must be mentally, physically and spiritually healthy in this
respect, before we can enter the spiritual world in a way that
is healthy. If we are, then no one will be able to raise the
more or less philistine objection that there is something
uncomfortable about listening in to our own capacity for love.
To do so makes a shattering impression, it is true. We see
ourselves as never before in ordinary consciousness. What
we attain in higher cognition, however, does not incorporate
itself into the memory — if it did, we should be capable
of marching through life fondly contemplating our own capacity
for love, which would make us inadequate as people. And,
remembering this, you will know what to make of these demands
on super-sensible knowledge.

So
much for the relation of super-sensible knowledge to the
capacity for love, from an intellectual standpoint. But what do
we experience as a result of it?

It
is clear from what I have said already that we effuse our
intensified self into our surroundings. In this way the self
moves forward to the spiritual sphere, and we now come up
against the curious fact that, by making ourselves increasingly
able to enter into the outside world, we actually arrive at
knowledge of our psychic and our spiritual self.

Goethe's instinct in rejecting the knowledge of self that
results from brooding introspection was, I would say, a healthy
one. He had hard things to say about this kind of mystical
self-knowledge. Man can attain true self-knowledge only if, by
strengthening his otherwise dormant powers of knowledge, he
attains the capacity to explore with his self the outside
world. It is in the world outside that man finds his real
knowledge of self! We must learn to reach a true knowledge of
the world, in the modern sense, by turning many familiar
concepts almost back to front. And so it is with the concept of
self-knowledge: look out at the world, travel further and
further into the distance; in strengthening, by the
development of cognitive powers, your capacity to explore these
distances, you will find your real self. We can therefore say:
the cosmos allows us to penetrate it to gain super-sensible
knowledge; and what it gives back to us as a result of this
penetration is precisely our knowledge of self.

Let
us look at this other aspect of experience, which is
sometimes sought by a false mystical path. I have shown
how the human will can be developed, and how it is possible to
develop dormant powers. The will can be developed to such an
extent that the whole man becomes a kind of sense-organ, or
rather spirit-organ — becomes, that is, as transparent in
soul and spirit as the human eye is transparent. We need only
recall how selfless (in a material sense) the human eye must be
to act as the organ of sight. If the eye were to fill with
self-assertive material, our field of vision would at once grow
dim. Our entire human nature must come to be like this, on the
spiritual plane. Our entire being, soul and spirit, must become
transparent. With what is vital in our will, we can then enter
the spiritual world even during our earthly existence. There
now supervenes, however, what I already hinted at yesterday: by
seeing the spiritual world, we are enabled to comprehend our
inner self. And, as I explained yesterday, when as physical and
sensuous beings we confront the outside world, we enter into
its sensuous and physical phenomena with our entire being, and
carry away with us psychic memory-images. Indeed, our soul is
made up of these images. We can say therefore: what is physical
and sensuous without is seen as semblance within. Conversely, I
would say: in attaining the capacity to look out, through the
spirit-organ that is our self, into the outside world as a
spiritual one, with spiritual entities and events, we perceive
our own inner physical body. We learn to know the substance of
our lungs, heart and other organs. The spirituality of the
outside world is reflected by the physical nature within us,
just as the physical outside world is reflected by our
spiritual, abstract nature.

But
the way thus opened up to us of learning to know
ourselves by contemplating the outside world, turns out
to be a very concrete one. We come to know the place of the
individual organs in man's total substance. Gradually, we learn
to perceive the harmony between the individual processes in
these organs.

The
first discovery we make is as follows: what the mystic is
angling for in his clouded waters turn out, ultimately, to be
transformed memories; but they often contain an admixture of
something produced by an organic activity. He doesn't know
this, of course. He believes that he is piercing the internal
mirror that underlies memory. He is not piercing it. The
processes of our organic being beat like waves upon the other
side of the mirror. The mystic is not aware of what is really
going on: he is only aware of a change in the memories that are
reflected. Without becoming guilty of philistinism in the
process, we are forced to reduce much that is beautiful,
poetic, mystical, to prose and say: much that this or that
mystic has drawn up from his soul in this way is not the
expression of spiritual existence, but only a consequence of
the surge of inner organic processes. Wonderful mystical
accounts of ancient and recent times — from which those
who take pleasure in such things can gain an extraordinarily
poetic impression — are in the last analysis, for anyone
who can see things objectively, no more than the expression of
inner processes in human nature itself. It seems philistine to
have to say: something mystical makes its appearance; it
strikes us as poetic, and yet to anyone who understands,
it represents the impact of certain vital processes on the
memories. For the serious seeker after knowledge, it does not
become entirely valueless on that account. For the truth in
anything that is said does not reside in the way in which
it is presented, which may be agreeable to limited minds,
but rather in the fact that a genuine attempt is being made to
get nearer to the root of the matter.

The
nebulous mystic remains caught in ordinary consciousness.
The man who goes beyond this and, after first ensuring his
psychic health by means of preparatory exercises that emphasize
the formation of a healthy memory, pierces this mirror of
memory and really looks into himself, will see there the
effects of wide-ranging processes, originating in the spiritual
outside world and continuing still in the spiritual world. In
this way we come to know man, and to say to ourselves: what the
abstract idealist may regard as something base in man, because
he is looking at it only physiologically or anatomically, from
the outside — man's inner organism — is a
wonderful consequence of the entire cosmos.

And
when we really come to know this inner organism, this is what
we discover: when we look into our spiritual self and go back
in memory over much that we have experienced in life, we can
then, from what we revive within us at a congenial hour,
conjure up these experiences before our mind's eye, if only as
shades. From the image-content our soul has absorbed from the
outside world, we can once again conjure up this world before
our soul in a way that satisfies us. If we also learn to know
our comprehensive inner organism, and learn how its individual
parts are spiritually derived from the cosmos, our entire
being, as we now perceive it, will present itself as a record
of cosmic memories. We look into ourselves, not now with
the eye of the nebulous mystic, but with an awakened
“mind's eye,” and can perceive the nature of our
lungs, our heart, the whole of the rest of our organism, looked
at spiritually, inwardly. All this presents itself to us as
memory of the world, recorded in man just as our memory of the
life between birth and the present is recorded in the soul.
There now appears in us what we can call knowledge of man as a
memory of the world, a replica of the world's development
and of the course of the cosmos.

The
first thing to do is to familiarize yourselves with the
detailed exercises that must be undertaken before man arrives
at such a knowledge of self — not the brooding
self-knowledge of ordinary introspection, as it is called, but
the self-knowledge that sees in each of our internal organs
something like a combination of spiritual elements resulting
from certain spiritual processes in the cosmos. Once they have
understood this aspect of man, people will no longer accuse us
of transposing what is in our soul anthropomorphically into the
world, in order to explain the world in a spiritual way.
Instead, they will say: We first attempt, cautiously and
seriously, to penetrate inside man, and there will then be
revealed to us the cosmos, just as when we look at memories the
sum of personal experience reveals itself.

Such things may appear paradoxical to present-day
consciousness, and yet this consciousness is on the way
to apprehending them. There is a longing to follow up certain
trends of thought that are already there. When men do so
— a certain amount of practice is, of course, required
— the thoughts that lie along these lines will develop
more and more into vitalized thoughts. And when, in addition to
this, the will has been developed, men will enter increasingly
upon this kind of self-knowledge and see that, whilst on the
one hand the continual advance of the self into the outside
world leads to knowledge of self, penetration into the depths
of man's nature leads outward from man to knowledge of
the world.

To
cultivate a disinterested approach to these matters, it is
necessary to look at the nature of man in a way that is
different from that usually adopted today. People today dissect
man's bone system, muscle system and nervous system, and take
the results as a definition of his physical being. They can
then envisage man as if he were a creature of solid
material constituents. Yet everyone today knows that,
essentially, man is not made up of solid constituents: for the
most part — some ninety per cent, in fact — he is a
column of water. Everyone today knows that the air I have just
breathed in was previously outside in the world, and that the
air I now have functioning within me will later be outside once
more and belong to the world. And finally, everyone can
comprehend that the human organism has a continuous
exchange of heat. When we look at man in this way, we gradually
escape from our illusion of his solidity. We recognize it
as an illusion, and yet we cling to it in our soul, as if
believing that man resembled the rough sketch anatomy gives of
him. With equal justification, we shall come to regard the
liquid in man as part of his being — what vibrates,
surges and creates in man the liquid being. We shall come to
perceive that the air in man is also part of his being. And
finally, we may come to comprehend that the air inside us
that vibrates, surges, moves up and down, diffuses itself
through the currents in our veins and functions within
us, is warmed in some places and cooled in others.

The
soul-spiritual element that we carry within us today in this
more or less abstract form suffers from a marked semblance
character, so that we can really only perceive it from within,
as we say. Nor can we escape from this perception from within
by looking at what physiology and anatomy tell us about man.
All the magnificent results that ordinary science has achieved
present us with a solid shape of complex structure; yet
it is one quite different in kind from what we observe within
us when we visualize our thinking, feeling and volition, and we
cannot find a bridge from one to the other. We can watch the
struggles of psychologists to establish a relationship between
what they comprehend in its abstractness and semblance nature
— the only way that is open to their inward perception
— and what exists outside. The two things are so
far apart that we cannot establish a connection between them
directly, through ordinary consciousness. But if we
proceed without prejudice and fix our eyes, not upon an
illusion of the solid man, but upon man as a being of liquid, a
being of air and heat, then by a process of empathy with
ourselves we shall become aware of the flow of heat and cold in
the currents of our respiratory circulation, if we
provide a basis on which we can do so.

We
can reach such a basis by the path of higher knowledge as I
have tried to describe it in the last few days. In learning to
apprehend the air that vibrates inside us, we remain more or
less within the physical realm; but when we apprehend it and
then transfer the vitalized thinking that detects something of
reality within, the bridge is established for us. And if we
become aware of man down to the details of his temperature
variations, and condense the psychic element until, out of its
abstractness, it attains to reality, we shall find the
bridge.

Condensed in this way, the life of the soul can link itself
with rarefied physical experience. When we begin to penetrate
ourselves and thereby perceive how vitalized thought
moves in our being of air, if I may so express myself, in which
there are certain temperature variations, we gradually
see how in fact differences of thought can also operate
in our human organism. Thus, a sympathetic thought, for example
the verdict: “Yes indeed, the tree is green,” does
in fact induce a state of heat, whereas a thought in which
antipathy is present, a negative judgment for example, has a
chilling effect on our air-heat substance.

In
this way, we see how the psychic element continues to vibrate
and create through finer materiality into denser
materiality. We find it possible to direct our path of
knowledge into the human organism too in such a way that we
start with the psychic and go on into the material.

This in turn makes it possible for us to advance further and
further towards what I have just been describing: an inner
knowledge of the human organism. For the psyche will not
unveil itself to us until we can trace the various levels
of materiality — water, air and fire — in the
individual organs. We must first condense the psychic element;
only then shall we reach man's physical nature and come in
turn, by passing through this, to the spiritual basis of our
physical organism. Just as, when we sink shafts into ourselves
with the aid of memory, we discover the laid-up experiences of
our individual existence on earth, so too, in thus descending
into the whole man, we shall find the spiritual element that
has come down from the spiritual world through conception,
foetal development and so on. In clothing itself in us, with
what it acquires from the earth, this spiritual element becomes
world-memory.
We find the cosmos stored up as recollection
inside us. And we thus find it possible — exactly as in
ordinary consciousness we can remember the individual
experience of personal existence — to survey the cosmos
through inward contemplation.

You
will perhaps ask: Yes, but when we get back to very early
states of the earth by means of this world-memory, how can we
avoid the danger of a general description of spirit
usurping the concrete world-recollection? Once again, we
only need to make a comparison with ordinary memory. Because
our memory is well ordered, we shall not, in feeling some
experience that has taken place ten years before float to the
surface, refer it to events that have only just taken place.
The content of the memory itself helps us to date it correctly.
Similarly, when we understand our organism aright, we find that
each of its separate parts points to the relevant moment in the
world's development. In the last analysis, what natural science
produces theoretically by extending its observations from the
present back into earlier ages can only properly be completed
by man's self-contemplation, which leads to a real
world-recollection, a world-memory. Otherwise, we shall
always be condemned to fall into curious errors when we
construct hypothetical theories of world-evolution.

What I am about to say may sound trivial, but it will
illustrate my point. The so-called Kant-Laplace theory, now of
course modified — the theory of how the individual bodies
in the solar system split off from a nebula in the universe
— is commonly illustrated by taking a drop of oil, making
a hole in a circular piece of card, fastening a pin through it,
and rotating the drop of oil by means of the pin. Individual
droplets separate off and continue to revolve round the main
drop. A miniature solar system forms, and from the standpoint
of the ordinary scientist one can say: The same thing, on a
larger scale, took place out there in space! But something else
is also true: anyone demonstrating something like this,
to illustrate the origin of our solar system, would have to
take all the factors into account; he would thus have to take
into account the teacher standing there and rotating the drop
of oil. He would have to place an enormous teacher out in
space, to rotate the cloud. This point, however, has been
forgotten in the experiment I have described. Elsewhere in
life, it is a very fine thing to forget the self; but in an
experiment, in illustrating important and serious
problems, one must not forget such things. Well, the philosophy
of life I am advocating does not forget them. It accepts
what is justified in natural science, but also adds what can be
seen in the spirit. And here, of course, we do not find an
enormous individual, but rather a spiritual world, which has to
be superimposed on the material development. We thereby
permeate the Kant-Laplace primal nebula which, perhaps rightly,
has been posited, with the spiritual entities and forces
operative in it. And we permeate what will become of the earth
in the so-called heat-death, of which present-day science
speaks, with spiritual entities and forces. After the
heat-death, these will then carry the spiritual element out
into other worlds, just as the spiritual element in man is
carried out into other worlds when the body disintegrates into
its earthly elements. In this way we attain something
significant for our time.

I
have demonstrated, I think, that what is ordinarily
apprehended only in abstract cognition — the
spiritual element, which cannot be reconciled with the material
— is infinitely far removed mentally from matter.
What has followed from this for our entire cultural life?
Because in ordinary consciousness we are unable to reconcile
the spiritual and the material, we have a purely material view
of the world's history: we form concepts of a purely physical
process, with a beginning conceived in purely physical terms,
in accordance with the laws of mechanics, and an end conceived,
in accordance with thermodynamics, as the heat-death of the
earth. At the same time, we are aware of ourselves as men,
standing inside this process and evolving from it in a way that
is certainly unintelligible to present-day science. If we are
honest, however, we have to admit that we can never connect up
our mental experience with what goes on outside in the material
sphere. And at this deepest level of the soul, interwoven
with our thinking, feeling and volition, are moral
impulses and religious forces. They live within us, in
the spiritual element we cannot reconcile with the
material.

And
so, perhaps, the man of today, with his consciousness, may
conclude: natural science leads us only to a material
process; this alone makes up exact science; for moral
impulses and religious forces, we require concepts of
faith!

This view, however, is incompatible with a serious life of the
soul. And in their unconscious minds, serious people today feel
(though they may not admit) that the earth has evolved from the
purely material. From this emerges a kind of bubble. There
arise cloud-formations, and indeed shapes thinner even than
clouds, mere illusions. In these exist the greatest value we
can absorb as men, all our cultural values. We go on living for
a while, and one day there supervenes the earth's entry into
its heat-death, which can be foretold on external scientific
evidence. At this point, it is as if all life on earth is
buried in an enormous graveyard. The most valuable things
that have arisen from our human life, our finest and noblest
ideals, are buried alongside what was the material substance of
the earth. You can say that you don't believe it. But anyone
who reacts honestly to what is often thought about these things
today by people who reject independent spiritual
research, could not avoid the inner dissonance and
pessimism that arise in face of the question: What is to become
of our spiritual activity if we regard the world in a purely
material sense, as we are accustomed to do in exact science as
it is called? This is the origin of the wide gulf that yawns in
our time between religious and moral life and the natural
approach to things.

It
seems to me that, in these circumstances, a genuine seership,
an exact vision is called for, one suited to modern man, to
establish a bridge between spiritual and material, by
providing a basis of reality for the spiritual and taking from
the material its coarseness as I would call it.

That is above all what we bring before us when we look at
things as we have done today. We have seen the spiritual in man
himself gradually passing over into his heat and air
variations. By descending into the coarser material sphere and
seeing how the finer element flows into vitalized thinking, we
shall we able to think our way into the cosmos and understand
correctly something like the heat-death of the earth
— because we know how our own human heat in its
differentiation is permeated by vitalized thinking. And from
the standpoint of the world-memory that appears in ourselves,
we can look at what is spiritually active in the material
processes of the world. In this way we arrive at a real
reconciliation between what presents itself to us spiritually
and what presents itself to us materially.

There is, it is true, much in people's hearts today that still
militates against such a reconciliation. For in recent
centuries we have grown accustomed to count truths as exact
only where they rest upon a solid basis of sensory observation,
in which we surrender passively to the outside world. What has
been observed on this kind of solid basis is then built up into
natural laws and natural theories; and theories are accepted as
valid only when they rest upon this solid basis of sensory
observation.

Those who think like this are people who will only admit
ordinary gravity to operate in space, and who say: “The
earth has its gravity, and bodies must fall towards the earth
and have a support, because they cannot float about freely in
space.” This is true, so long as we are standing on the
earth and considering the earth's gravity in relation to its
immediate surroundings. But if we look out into space, we know
that we cannot say: “The heavenly bodies must be
supported,” but must say: “They support one
another.” We need to attain this attitude, in a form
appropriate to the spirit, for our inner universe of
knowledge.

We
must be capable of developing truths that specifically do not
require the support of sensory perception, but support one
another as do the heavenly bodies in space. This is, in fact, a
precondition for the attainment of a real cosmology, one that
is not made up simply of material processes, but in which the
material is shot through with soul and spirit. And such a
cosmology is needed by modern man. We shall see how he
needs it even for his immediate social tasks. But not until we
perceive how the really significant truths support one another
shall we understand how we can win through to a cosmology of
this kind.

Such a cosmology results when we accept as valid the way in
which true self-knowledge is attained. We do not attain it
anthropomorphically, by going out into the universe with our
own experience of self. By entering the outside world, we
discover more and more about our ego and so achieve
knowledge of self. And when we then go down into it, our inner
self becomes world-memory and we learn world-knowledge.
Many people already sense the nature of the secret pertaining
to knowledge of the world. I should like to express in
two sentences what they divine. Self-knowledge and
world-knowledge must be truths that mutually support each
other. And of this nature, moving to and fro in a pendulum
motion, are the truths that are attained by the philosophy of
the world and of life I am here describing: as self-knowledge
and as world-knowledge. The two sentences in which I should
like to sum this up are the following:

If
you would know yourself, seek yourself in the universe; if you
would know the world, penetrate your own depths. Your own
depths will reveal to you, as in a world-memory, the secrets of
the cosmos.